Strategic partnership aims to maximise ancillary revenue potential

TouchStar On-Board Retail, and STS, a payments acceptance software specialist, have formed a new strategic partnership to deliver an improved payments acceptance capability for the transport sector including airlines.

As part of the partnership, STS’s advanced G8 payments application, that separates payments processing logic from a point of sale application, has been integrated to the TouchStar NovoStar product suite. The NovoStar POS application has more than 5,000 deployments around the world and relied on by many international airlines.

“Today, consumers are looking for increased choice on how and where they can pay for goods and services and businesses are needing to boost ancillary revenue streams ” said Patrick Clark, general manager of TouchStar’s On-Board division. “Payment processing has become an increasingly complex field that is why we are delighted to be partnering with such a highly respected payments specialist as STS.”

“Accepting payments on board a plane, train or bus brings many new challenges not faced by high street retailers” said Steve Turner, CEO of STS “These relate to infrastructure, communication and resilience issues as well as bespoke functionality. Off-line PIN verification, transaction batch support, remote device management and international aspects related to multi country, currency and language all have to be delivered.”

Generating ancillary revenue has become a high priority for transportation companies, particularly airlines, as low cost operators and new competitors have entered markets. The top 10 airlines globally generated US$28 billion in ancillary revenue in 2016 – an increase of 1,233% over the last ten years.